Globaldata Share Discussion Threads

[littleredrooster] 25/4/2017 14:20

25 April 2017

GlobalData Plc

Annual General Meeting ("AGM") Statement

GlobalData announces that at its AGM today the following statements will be made by the Chairman:-

New Banking Facilities

As announced on 19 April 2017, we have negotiated new banking facilities with The Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Bank of Ireland. A new five year facility replaces the Group's current arrangements which were due to expire in July 2019. The new £75 million committed multi-currency facility includes a £30 million term loan, a £30 million acquisition revolving credit facility, a £15 million working capital revolving credit facility and a £25 million uncommitted accordion facility.

The new banking arrangements provide significant available liquidity for both general working capital requirements and where appropriate, the financing of further acquisitions.

We are very pleased to have received such strong support from both our existing bank, The Royal Bank of Scotland, and our new lenders.

Capital Markets Day

We will be holding a Capital Markets Day on 23 May 2017 at our offices for analysts and accredited institutional investors. In a series of presentations, GlobalData will focus on its sales and marketing strategy and will provide live demonstrations of its product offering. For the avoidance of doubt, no new material trading or financial information will be disclosed.

Kelsey van Musschenbroek and Mark Freebairn

I should also like to express my thanks to Kelsey van Musschenbroek and Mark Freebairn, who are stepping down today, for their help and hard work and for their years of service. I also welcome our recently appointed non-executive directors Annette Barnes and Andrew Day.



25 April 2017

Result of Annual General Meeting ("AGM")

GlobalData announces that, at the AGM of the Company held earlier today, all resolutions put to shareholders were duly passed.

[littleredrooster] 23/4/2017 12:17

What Is Tesla Really Worth?--Heard on the Street

16/04/2017 7:26pm

Dow Jones News

By Charley Grant

Tesla Inc. is valued as though it will soon conquer the U.S. auto market. Now, it has the small task of actually doing so.

Tesla shares have been unstoppable ahead of the Model 3 launch, having gained 40% this year. The upstart auto maker is more valuable than Ford and slightly less valuable than General Motors on a market cap basis. The crux of the excitement is the all-electric Model 3 sedan that Tesla says will start at $35,000. Production is scheduled to begin this summer.

Tesla now trades at 271 times projected 2018 adjusted earnings, according to FactSet. Ford and GM, in contrast, trade at less than seven and six times the 2018 estimate, respectively. Tesla gets that valuation because it is expected to upend the auto industry, while earning big profits that would bring down the multiple.

But to actually earn enough profits to reduce Tesla's multiple to something in the realm of reasonable would require almost heroic assumptions. First, the basics: Say Tesla's valuation should be 10 times higher than GM and Ford's, and say Tesla's share price stays constant at about $300. That means Tesla would need to earn $4.29 a share in 2018, which equals $700 million in total net income, assuming the current share count doesn't change.

For perspective, Tesla sold about 76,000 cars in 2016 and lost $675 million on sales of $7 billion.

Now the assumptions: CEO Elon Musk forecasts Tesla can produce 500,000 cars in 2018, while analysts, a bullish lot, peg the number of deliveries at 302,000. Let's say the delivery number is 380,000. Pencil in an average selling price of $50,000 -- Tesla will still be selling high-priced Model S and Model X vehicles along with the Model 3. That scenario yields just under $21 billion in automotive revenue. Add another $2 billion in sales from its residential solar and energy businesses.

Tesla has never generated a positive operating margin for a full year, but assume it gets savings on battery costs and realizes economies of scale. If Tesla gets the same 5.4% operating margin that GM and Ford averaged last year, it would generate operating income of $1.1 billion. Subtract $200 million for interest expense and tax the remainder at 25%: The result is $700 million in net income, giving Tesla a multiple roughly 10 times bigger than GM and Ford.

To get there, the company would have to quintuple the number of cars it sells, earn margins equivalent to those of its highly efficient competitors and not sell new shares. Tweak any of these variables -- lower sales, lower margin, lower selling price -- and Tesla doesn't come close to earning enough to get to 10 times the multiple of its bigger rivals by the end of 2018.

Valuation has never mattered before for Tesla's investors and it may not matter at the end of next year. Shareholders may be willing to wait five years instead of two for Tesla to generate big profits, or they may continue to figure that valuation doesn't matter for a game-changer like Tesla.

Tesla's cars have always outshone its financials. That needs to change soon for its valuation to make sense.

[littleredrooster] 23/4/2017 12:11

UK is capital of Europe for fintech unicorns

James Titcomb

19 April 2017 • 7:00pm

The UK dominates the European financial technology industry, with figures showing it boasts more billion-dollar fintech companies than the rest of the continent put together.

Britain houses four fintech “unicorns” - companies valued at $1bn (£780m) or more - with a combined valuation of $18.5bn, according to a report by the technology investment bank GP Bullhound.

This compares to two in the rest of Europe, which are worth $4.6bn between them. London has emerged as Europe’s fintech capital in recent years, with a swell of high-profile start-ups attempting to shake up the financial sector.

However, the report showed that both Europe and the US are lagging behind China as a hub for fintech. Funding to Asian fintech companies surged to $7.1bn last year, more than in the US and Europe between them. Investors put $4.6bn into American fintech firms against $1.4bn in Europe.

Globally, fintech investment grew slightly to $13.6bn, although there was a decrease in the number of investments from 942 to 840.

China, which is more underserved by the traditional financial system and has looser regulations than in Europe and the US, counts 13 fintech unicorns with a combined value of $112.3bn.

They include Ant Financial, a spin-off from the Chinese retail giant Alibaba, which is valued at around $60bn, and Lufax, the giant peer-to-peer lender.

“What’s driving them is a huge underserved market for consumers and small businesses with only very limited access to traditional financial services,” said GP Bullhound’s Carl Wessberg. “China has a slightly more open-market driven approach [to fintech], it’s slightly less regulated.”

British fintech companies mentioned by GP Bullhound include Markit, the financial information company, the money transfer firm Transferwise and peer-to-peer lender Funding Circle.

Last week, Mark Carney warned fintech firms that the Bank of England may have to step in with regulations if they threaten to disrupt the financial system.

“The challenge for policymakers is to ensure that fintech develops in a way that maximises the opportunities and minimises the risks for society,” the Bank’s Governor said.

[littleredrooster] 23/4/2017 12:05

The Group derives around 61% of revenues in currencies other than Sterling



Final Results For The Year Ended 31 December 2016

27 February 2017

5. Foreign exchange impact on revenues

The Group derives around 61% of revenues in currencies other than Sterling, which since 23 June 2016 has depreciated against all the Group's major trading currencies and in particular the US Dollar and Euro. The impact of exchange rate movements on our revenues for 2016 was somewhat muted as the Group derives a significant proportion of its revenues from annual subscription contracts whereby revenues are crystallised and amortised at the exchange rate at date of invoice. Consequently a significant proportion of our reported revenues were booked at rates prevailing prior to the 23 June 2016. The benefit of exchange rate movements to reported revenues for 2016 was £2.2m, which accounts for 3.7% of our year on year growth.

6. Foreign exchange impact on costs and Adjusted EBITDA

In Sterling terms, circa 57% of our costs are denominated in currencies other than Sterling. Costs are translated as they are incurred at the prevailing exchange rate. Thus, adverse movements in exchange rates have an immediate impact on our earnings. The effect of exchange rate movements on our cost base was to increase our operating costs for 2016 by 5.1% or £2.5m.

The net effect (revenue benefit less cost impact) on Adjusted EBITDA was a decrease of £0.3m.

[littleredrooster] 19/4/2017 13:40

liquidity to fund potential future acquisitions



19 April 2017

GlobalData Plc

New Banking Facilities

GlobalData (the "Group") is pleased to announce a new £75.0 million, 5 year, committed banking facility. The committed facility consists of a £30.0 million term loan to replace the existing facilities held with The Royal Bank of Scotland, plus a revolving credit facility of £45.0 million. In addition to the committed £75.0 million, the Group will also have available a £25.0 million accordion facility providing significant additional funding capability for future investment.

The banking arrangements provide the Group with significant available liquidity to fund potential future acquisitions. The facilities have been provided by The Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC and Bank of Ireland.

Commenting on the new facilities, Bernard Cragg, Executive Chairman said:

"The new facilities provide the Group with enhanced liquidity which gives us greater flexibility to look at potential acquisitions in the future. We are very pleased to have received such strong support from both our existing bank, The Royal Bank of Scotland, and our new lenders."

[littleredrooster] 12/4/2017 09:40

hxxp://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2017/04/11/autonation-ceo-tesla-might-be-one-great-ponzi-schemes-all-time.html

AutoNation CEO: Tesla Might be 'One of the Great Ponzi Schemes of All Time'

By Mike Spector and Christina Rogers

Published April 11, 2017

"The head of the U.S.'s largest car-dealership chain called Tesla Inc.'s market value "inexplicable," a day after investors pushed the Silicon Valley auto maker ahead of General Motors Co.

Tesla "is either one of the great Ponzi schemes of all time" or will eventually work out for investors, said AutoNation Inc. Chief Executive Mike Jackson during an interview at a New York automotive event held by J.D. Power and the National Automobile Dealers Association on Tuesday.

Mr. Jackson, among the auto industry's more outspoken executives, called Tesla overvalued and GM undervalued at roughly $33 a share, arguing the former will continue to struggle to make money selling electric vehicles despite a loyal following.

Competition would eventually lead to a correction to the Palo Alto, Calif., company's market value, he said. GM and other auto makers are investing billions of dollars in electric vehicles that are set to hit showrooms in coming years.

A Tesla spokeswoman didn't immediately respond to a request to comment.

Tesla briefly leapfrogged GM as the most valuable auto maker in the U.S. on Monday when the company's stock price surged to $313.73, valuing it at $51.17 billion. Tesla last week also surpassed Ford Motor Co. in market value."

[littleredrooster] 08/4/2017 13:25

Mass uptake of electric vehicles is set to happen in China first

hxxp://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb=5028&mn=76308&pt=msg&mid=17044255

Ford Plans Electric Vehicles In China

Moss, Trefor. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]07 Apr 2017: B.1.

SHANGHAI -- Ford Motor Co. said it would start building electric cars in China to tap into a state-sponsored boom in green-energy vehicles.

In doing so, the Detroit-based company signaled that it had swallowed industry concerns about bringing proprietary electric-car technology to China, despite misgivings among foreign auto makers about intellectual-property protection in the world's largest auto market.

"It's manifest destiny" for foreign car makers to get past those fears and start building electric cars in China, said Bill Russo, managing director of Gao Feng Advisory, a Shanghai consulting firm.

Mass uptake of electric vehicles is set to happen in China first, he said, "and none of those companies can afford not to be relevant to the future of their industry."

Ford's local joint venture, Changan Ford Automobile Co., will start building the Mondeo Energi plug-in hybrid vehicle in China next year, with a new all-electric sport-utility vehicle set to follow within five years, the company said Thursday.

Electric powertrains will be manufactured in China by 2020, and by 2025 all of Changan Ford's vehicles will come in electrified versions, it said.

"The time is right for Ford to expand our EV lineup and investments in China," said Ford Chief Executive Mark Fields.

China is already the world's largest market for electric vehicles, with over half a million electric or hybrid cars sold there last year, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

The government is encouraging them by heavily subsidizing electric cars.

Local authorities have also set ambitious targets for electrifying bus and taxi fleets over the next few years, and for the rollout of electric-vehicle charging facilities.

There could be as many as 32 million new-energy vehicles in China by 2025, according to Gao Feng Advisory, a total that is likely to be a substantial share of the global fleet, with the increase in electric vehicles in the U.S. and Europe happening more slowly.

While most gasoline-powered cars sold in China are built by foreign auto makers operating through joint ventures, almost all of the electric cars sold in China last year were made by Chinese companies operating without foreign involvement.

[littleredrooster] 04/4/2017 08:21

Well, I must admit that this surprises me.

"Tesla surpassed US motor pioneer Ford in market value"



Tesla shares hit all-time high on upbeat deliveries

Monday, 3 April, 2017

"Tesla, the upstart electric carmaker, surpassed US motor pioneer Ford in market value on Monday, as investors look to a future beyond the internal combustion engine.

Shares of Tesla, founded in 2003, rose 7.3 per cent to a market capitalisation of $48.7bn, gliding past the 100-year-old Ford, whose shares fell 1.7 per cent after disappointing March sales results to a market value of $45.3bn.

While it is symbolic for a Silicon Valley start-up to surpass the valuation of a company that helped make motor cars ubiquitous in early 20th century America, car market analysts point out that Tesla achieved the feat based on global deliveries of only 76,000 cars last year, compared with Ford’s global sales in 2016 of 6.6m.

“The stock market has always treated Ford like an industrial stock while Tesla has been considered a tech stock,” said Michelle Krebs of Autotrader.com.

“Let’s remember: Ford earns money, lots of it. Tesla does not. The real test for Tesla comes when it launches the Model 3, the high-volume, mainstream-priced electric vehicle that is supposed to help the company achieve profitability.”

While Tesla’s stock market value surpassed Ford’s for the first time, the electric carmaker had already surpassed its rival in terms of the broader measure of enterprise value.

Based on enterprise value — a more complete measure of companies’ respective values, since it takes account of their net debt or net cash positions — Tesla is worth just under $60bn, while Ford is worth $39.1bn."

[littleredrooster] 03/4/2017 09:43

94% of video ads are viewed on television



Twitter targets tie-ups with pay-TV broadcasters in live video push

James Titcomb

2 April 2017 • 11:40pm

Twitter is seeking to ink deals with pay-TV companies that would let subscribers watch live channels over the social network as part of a major video push.

The move raises the possibility of full Premier League football games and TV series appearing on Twitter for the first time as the troubled company looks for new ways to grow users.

Under mooted deals with broadcasters such as Sky and BT, or equivalents in other countries like ESPN, customers who already have TV subscriptions would be able to link their subscriptions with their Twitter account, giving them access to paid-for channels within the Twitter app.

It means that users could watch live Premier League games or TV premieres on Twitter, at the same time as reading and posting tweets about what they are watching.

Twitter has been heavily pushing into live TV in recent months. Last year it signed a deal with ESPN to stream Wimbledon matches, as well as buying NFL American football rights. It also livestreamed Sky Sports coverage of the football transfer window’s final day in January.

But Twitter is prevented from showing sports events such as the Premier League on the social network because broadcasting rights are fiercely protected by TV companies. Having users log in with their subscription details would fix this by only letting paying subscribers to watch.

Twitter is often at its busiest during a major TV event such as a football game or popular series, and the company’s own push into live TV is an attempt to merge the two experiences.

Live TV events to date have been presented within the Twitter app as a video at the top of the screen with tweets about the event appearing beneath it.

“Bringing the video forward [onto Twitter itself] allows us to give the consumer on one screen the things they’re talking about and [a] timeline of the best tweets on Twitter at that moment in time,” Anthony Noto, the company’s chief operating officer, told the Telegraph.

“We would love to have the Premier League… we would love to have live games and we'll continue to try to find creative ways to get there.”

Twitter, which has struggled to attract new users and has made continual losses, is pushing into video as a way of both increasing revenues and attracting more people to the social network.

[littleredrooster] 01/4/2017 12:53

A few recent positive tweets from Andrew Neil.



Foreign direct investment in the UK rose sharply in the final quarter 2016 to £110 billion, the highest level since 2014.

12:37 am - 1 Apr 2017

Current account deficit fell from 5.3% to 2.4% GDP, lowest since 2012; biggest quarterly decline since records began in 1955.

12:35 am - 1 Apr 2017

UK current account deficit improved by largest amount on record -- deficit fell to £12 billion in Q4 2016 v £25.7 billion in Q3.

12:33 am - 1 Apr 2017

[littleredrooster] 30/3/2017 12:46

Current Analysis Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of GlobalData Plc

hxxp://www.currentanalysis.com/

hxxp://www.currentanalysis.com/markets/

hxxp://www.currentanalysis.com/about/analysts.asp

hxxp://www.currentanalysis.com/events/

[littleredrooster] 12/3/2017 19:31

hxxp://www.mrweb.com/drno/news24044.htm

Banner Year for Newly Named GlobalData

February 27 2017

Business information firm GlobalData Plc (previously PDM) has announced final results for the calendar year 2016, including group revenues passing £100m - including organic growth of 24% and the effect of major acquisitions. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 71% to £20.6m.

Originally an ISP, themutual.net (later TMN), the company was acquired in 2009 via a reverse takeover by Progressive Digital Media Ltd (PDM), whose name it took. It also moved away from the ISP model towards a focus on information services. The company, which is chaired by Datamonitor founder Mike Danson, bought GlobalData Holding Ltd a year ago and has since become GlobalData Plc.

The last year's results reflect the acquisitions of a number of consumer-oriented businesses from Datamonitor last summer (Datamonitor Financial, Datamonitor Consumer, MarketLine and Verdict) from Informa Plc for a combined £25m; and of healthcare specialist GlobalData Holding, completed in January 2016. The two acquisitions have given the group broad coverage across these three sectors, while the latter of them has added 'management and operational scale' in North America, the firm says.

Reported revenue increased 65% to £100.0m. Executive Chairman Bernard Cragg comments: 'The business has performed well over the past year, achieving record levels of both reported and deferred revenues. We have combined three businesses to create a leading global business information company. Our results for the year's trading are encouraging, more so given that for much of the year we focused on integrating the businesses and creating a strong global platform. We are now leveraging this platform to drive significant growth and profitability'.

Cragg says the group aims to continue strong organic growth, and make acquisitions that are strategic and earnings accretive, including 'small bolt-on acquisitions that either broaden our offering or extend our client reach in an existing market'.

GlobalData has also announced board changes, with Kelsey van Musschenbroek (retirement) and Mark Freebairn due to depart as NEDs, and replacements appointed in Annette Barnes - currently a Managing Director and CEO of Lloyds Private Banking Ltd (subject to regulatory approval), and Andrew Day, Chief Data Officer for J Sainsbury Plc.

Web site: www.globaldata.com.

[littleredrooster] 12/3/2017 19:29

GlobalData starts new era with a bang

GlobalData's (DATA) bold mission to present consumer, healthcare and information communications technology customers with a single platform capable of "decoding" future market trends quicker than peers sounds almost too good to be true. Based on its performance in 2016, the group, formerly known as Progressive Digital Media, appears to be delivering on those promises.

The Aim-traded business information specialist began the year by changing its name to reflect the coming together of three businesses under its wing. The upshot of this new direction, created by a series of transformative acquisitions, was revenue hitting £100m and a 71 per cent rise in adjusted cash profit to £21m.

Encouragingly, nearly a quarter of sales were generated organically, while the weak pound only contributed £2.2m to the top line - most of GlobalData's 61 per cent foreign revenue was booked at pre-Brexit vote levels. Investors, who sent the shares up 3 per cent on results day, were also impressed by a 57 per cent rise in deferred sales to £46m and a 0.8 percentage point widening of the group's adjusted cash profit margin to 20.6 per cent. Management expects profit to continue growing as it creates further synergies from previous acquisitions.

House broker N+1 Singer forecasts 2017 adjusted pre-tax profit of £20.6m and EPS of 13.6p, up from £17.7m and 11.9p in 2016.

IC VIEW:

GlobalData's improved visibility, high potential and better-quality earnings don't come cheap. The shares, which have soared 140 per cent over the past 12 months, now trade at 44 times forecast earnings. Back to hold.

Last IC view: Buy, 249p, 4 Mar 2016

By Daniel Liberto,
28 February 2017

[littleredrooster] 12/3/2017 15:28

hxxps://simplywall.st/news/2017/03/07/globaldata-plc-aimdata-does-low-debt-load-make-it-a-financially-strong-company/

GlobalData Plc (AIM:DATA): Does Low Debt-Load Make It A Financially Strong Company?

Jodi Pearce

March 7, 2017

Companies with small market capitalization such as GlobalData Plc (AIM:DATA), while they can deliver high growth, financial strength is the deciding element in their long-term existence. A low debt-load—debt-to-equity ratio of 35.7% may have investors believing that the company is financially strong. However, financial strength also depends on how operating cash flows and earnings stack up against debt.

One of the major reasons that they are highly affected by a downturn in the country’s economy or an industry in the region is the lack of geographic diversification. So, investors often choose small-cap funds. While savvy investors aren’t wrong in looking for singular blockbuster opportunities and trying to achieve diversification on their own by allocating a small part of their portfolio capital to small-caps, that doesn’t make these investments less risky individually. However, to help you reduce that risk, I’m going to provide you with few basic aspects other than debt-to-equity ratio to gauge a ballpark estimate on how financially strong is the company.

Has GlobalData got enough cash to weather a storm?

Despite low debt, for GlobalData to continue operations during a downturn, it needs a sound liquidity position. When evaluating financial strength, I compare a company’s current assets (cash and liquid assets) to its total debt. DATA’s short-term assets (£50M) cover its total debt (£32M), so the company’s debt is not a major concern during adverse circumstances

hxxps://simplywall.st/news/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AIM-DATA-historical-debt-Tue-Mar-07-2017.jpg

Does DATA net enough to cover its debt-costs?

A different way of looking at financial health is to compare DATA’s earnings and interest-obligations. While both these numbers are taken from the income statement, they are important in understanding a company’s financial condition. Earnings at least 5x larger than it’s interest payments indicates sound financial strength as a company earns way more than its debt obligations, minimizing the risk of defaulting on its debt. In DATA’s case, the interest on debt is not strongly covered (ideally 5x) by earnings (earnings are 1.2x annual interest expense).

hxxps://simplywall.st/news/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AIM-DATA-net-worth-Tue-Mar-07-2017.jpg

Conclusion

Along with a low-debt-load, GlobalData also generates healthy operating cash flows. But the company’s earnings compared to its interest costs are still not at a level ideally expected from a financially strong company. Now when you know whether you should keep the debt in mind as a risk factor when putting together your investment thesis, I recommend you check out our latest free analysis report on GlobalData to see what are DATA’s growth prospects and whether it could be considered an undervalued opportunity.

[littleredrooster] 03/3/2017 01:05

Amazon said it is adding safeguards to prevent server capacity from falling too quickly

Sounds like a good idea.



Amazon Finds the Cause of Its AWS Outage: A Typo

Thursday 2 March 2017

By Laura Stevens

Amazon.com Inc. on Thursday blamed human error for an outage at its cloud-services unit that caused widespread disruption to internet traffic across the U.S. earlier this week.

In a post on its website, Amazon said the outage started with a typo at Amazon's North Virginia data centers Tuesday.

An employee trying to speed up the company's S3 cloud-storage billing system tried to take a few servers offline. The employee mistyped the command, however, affecting more servers than intended, which led to a cascade of failures that ultimately knocked out S3 and other Amazon services. It also took longer than expected to restart certain services, Amazon said.

Amazon said it is adding safeguards to prevent server capacity from falling too quickly or below a minimum level.

Amazon Web Services, the largest global seller of cloud infrastructure, has more than a million users. The hourslong outage Tuesday disabled and slowed apps and websites from a wide section of U.S. companies, including Quora Inc., Slack Technologies Inc. and Medium.com Inc.

The AWS outage cost companies in the S&P 500 index $150 million, according to Cyence Inc., a startup that specializes in estimating cyberrisks. Apica Inc., a website-monitoring company, said 54 of the internet's top 100 retailers saw website performance slow by 20% or more.

[littleredrooster] 02/3/2017 17:17

GlobalData's share price has roughly tripled over the past year.

[ny boy] 02/3/2017 17:03

Remember the dot com bubble..lastminute.com

[littleredrooster] 01/3/2017 16:31

the cloud is getting increasingly more reliable over time



Amazon failure disrupts hundreds of thousands of websites

SEC and key Apple services hit by outage of web services platform

Wednesday, 1 March, 2017

A widespread technical failure at Amazon Web Services hit hundreds of thousands of websites on Tuesday, including the US Securities and Exchange Commission and certain key Apple services, highlighting how the cloud company has become part of the backbone of the internet.

The failure, which began around 9:45am Pacific Time, lasted for more than four hours and centred around Amazon’s simple storage service, which is one of its most widely used features and a cornerstone for many web applications.

The outage temporarily blocked videos on Netflix and on Amazon’s own website, and caused sites such as Expedia, Slack and Snapchat to function poorly or not at all. Apple, which uses AWS, reported widespread technical problems at the same time, including with its App store, Apple Music and iCloud back-up.

“People are sort of realising how much of the internet relies on Amazon,” said Dave Bartoletti, an analyst at Forrester.

He added that AWS reliability was still considered to be high despite the outage. “This is not a trend in my view, the cloud is getting increasingly more reliable over time,” he said.

The fact that Amazon was able to identify the problem within two hours suggested that the problem was most likely a software glitch, said Mr Bartoletti. Amazon has not specified what caused the error.

Earlier in the day, the failure had even incapacitated AWS’s own services dashboard — making it impossible to display updates about which services had been affected — although this was subsequently fixed.

Amazon Web Services is the fastest-growing part of Amazon, with more than $12bn in revenues last year, and accounts for the majority of operating profits at the company. It is by far the largest public cloud provider in the US, with more than 10 times as much storage capacity as each of its nearest rivals, Microsoft and Google.

While AWS was an early leader in the cloud services market, it has had to contend with increasing competition from its US rivals, as well as competitors overseas such as AliCloud, which is owned by Alibaba.

AWS clients include the Central Intelligence Agency and dozens of Fortune 500 companies, including Deloitte, General Electric, Kellogg’s, Comcast and Condé Nast.

While the company often says that its reliability is greater than 99.99 per cent, the widespread problems on Tuesday underscore how an outage in one area can quickly ripple across the internet.

[anusol] 27/2/2017 07:27

Wow fabulous results

[old father time] 21/2/2017 19:40

Results on Monday. Need to be strong to support that chart.

[littleredrooster] 10/2/2017 13:17

hxxp://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/07/aws_bigger_than_the_next_three/

AWS cloud cash share: Bigger than Microsoft, IBM, Google COMBINED

Cloud democratising IT? Nah, it's shared by even fewer players

7 Feb 2017 at 12:25, Gavin Clarke

AWS sucked up over one third of all cloudy infrastructure sales globally in the closing quarter of 2016 - more than three of its next biggest rivals could muster together.

The total IaaS sector grew by a whopping 49 per cent year-on-year to $10.3bn in Q4, according to analyst house Canalys, as a raft of businesses continued to shun capital intensive refreshes of on-premise server estates.

In its tenth year of operation, the web services division of Amazon accounted for $3.48bn of sales, giving it a 33.8 per cent market share, while Microsoft, Google and IBM SoftLayer had to make do with $3.17bn between them.

“Continuing demand is driving the adoption of cloud infrastructure services, which accelerated the cloud data centre expansion among key service providers,” Canalys stated.

In the quarter, IBM rented some rack space from a local data centre provider, as did AWS and Microsoft. All of the American giants are trying to convince UK customers their data is safe in their hands but rather than building new facilities in the country, has chosen to buy extra capacity from someone else.

Enterprise IT provider Oracle lagged behind e-commerce giant Alibaba, on 1.7 per cent and 2.4 per cent respectively. The latter has been on a drive to attract enterprises and startups to its cloud with roadshow events in London.

AWS is the undisputed IaaS kingpin but revenues of $3.5bn in Q4 was below Wall Street’s expectations by about $100m and so the parent company’s share price took a few knocks.

Meanwhile, Synergy Research Group agreed that AWS is king, and said Microsoft, Google and IBM "are gaining ground but at the expense of smaller players in the market."

23 Comments

[littleredrooster] 02/2/2017 22:39

Amazon Web Services: the secret to the online retailer's future success

AWS was launched as little more than a way to buy space and time on Amazon’s computers. Now it powers Netflix, Airbnb and the Ministry of Justice

Alex Hern

Last modified on Thursday 2 February 2017 22.00 GMT

"But there’s another chunk of Amazon that you’re less likely to know about. It’s responsible for a full tenth of the company’s revenues, yet its “operating income” – the amount of money it leaves in Amazon’s coffers once expenses are accounted for – dwarfs any other sector, pulling in $861m compared to the $255m Amazon makes in North American sales and the $541m it loses internationally.

The division is Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the section of the company that sells cloud computing services to both the outside world and to Amazon itself. You can buy storage space to hold a huge database, bandwidth to host a website, or processing power to run complex software remotely. It lets companies and individuals avoid the hassle of buying and running their own hardware, while also letting them pay for only what they actually use.

It began as almost a point of principle for Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, before evolving to become the single most profitable part of the entire company. Now, AWS is moving into the third stage of its life, providing the underpinning for Amazon’s own quest to dominate not just our shopping, but our homes themselves."